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Free-market environmentalism is the political position that argues that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best means of preserving the environment, internalising pollution costs, and conserving resources. While environmental problems may be viewed as market failures, free market environmentalists argue that environmental problems arise because: # The state encodes, provides and enforces laws which override or obscure property rights and thus fail to protect them adequately. # Laws governing class or individual tort claims provide polluters with immunity from tort claims, or interfere with those claims in such a way as to make it difficult to legally sustain them. Free-market environmentalists therefore argue that the best way to protect the environment is to use tort and contract laws governing and protecting property rights and tort claims to protect the environment. They believe that if affected parties can compel polluters to compensate them they will reduce or eliminate the externality. Market proponents advocate changes to the legal system that empower affected parties to obtain such compensation. They further claim that governments have limited affected parties' ability to do so by complicating the tort system to benefit producers over others. Free-market environmentalists assert that economics is a branch of ecology. Both study complex interdependent systems science. The fundamental problem for economists is scarcity. ==Government Failure== Though many environmentalists blame markets for many of today's environmental problems, free-market environmentalists blame many of these problems on distortions of the market and the lack of markets. Government actions are blamed for a number of environmental detriments. *Tragedy of the Commons is seen as a fundamental problem for the environment. When land is held in common, anybody may use it. Since resources are consumable, this creates the incentive for entrepreneurs to use common resources before somebody else does. Many environmental resources are held by the government or in common, such as air, water, forests. The problem with regulation is that it puts property into a political commons, where individuals try to appropriate public resources for their own gain, a phenomenon called rent-seeking. *Tenure - Renters do not benefit from value accrued during their tenure and thus face an incentive to extract as much value as possible without conservation. *Political Allocation - Political information does not have the incentives that markets do to seek superior information (profit and loss). Though many participants provide input to governments, they can only make one decision. This means that governments create rules that are not well crafted for local situations. The government's strategy is that of anticipation, to hide from danger through regulations. A healthier society would use resilience, facing and overcoming risks. *Perverse Subsidies - Governments offer cross subsidies that distort price systems. This means that underconsumers and overconsumers are paying the same rates, so the underconsumer is overpaying and the overconsumer is underpaying. The incentive leads to more overconsumers and fewer underconsumers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Free-market environmentalism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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